The New YorkerModify

On Wednesday morning, well before the school run started, Mary Granlund was attempting to coax her dog outside for a brief walk in negative-two-degree weather, and her phone was already pinging with texts. “It’s, like, ‘Can someone help bring my kids to school today?’ ‘Can anybody pick my kids up from school today?’ ‘Has anyone called the police about the abandoned car?’ ” she told me.

Granlund is the chair of the school board in Columbia Heights, Minnesota, a northeastern suburb of Minneapolis. This community of about three square miles and twenty-two thousand people is, like much of the greater Minneapolis metro area, presently swarmed with agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol, and has been for weeks. Many parents who used to ferry their children to and from school every day have either been captured by ICE or are sheltering in place out of fear. Empty cars in the road are a common sight: lights on, engine still running, doors flung open. Educators and parents in the district have been working as chauffeurs, delivery drivers, bodyguards, and deterrence squads.

Among the untold thousands of children nationwide who have been swallowed up in ICE dragnets, six of them are students in the Columbia Heights school district. One is a fourth grader who was abducted with her mother when they were driving to school; they are currently being held in the notoriously abject South Texas Family Residential Center, in Dilley, Texas. Two seventeen-year-old students were also taken: one, a boy, is back home, but the other, a girl, is in Dilley. On Thursday, a pair of siblings in the second and fifth grade were taken into federal custody with their mother; they, too, are in Dilley.

So is the sixth student, Liam Conejo Ramos, a five-year-old boy from Ecuador. A single image of the little boy, snapped by a neighbor at the scene of his abduction, has become iconic of Operation Metro Surge, which is what the Department of Homeland Security calls their occupation of Minneapolis. In the picture, Liam stands next to a salt-stained S.U.V., bundled up for the cold and wearing a bright-blue winter hat with fluffy white bunny ears. Behind him, the disembodied hand of a federal agent grips his Spider-Man backpack.

Granlund, in her capacity as school-board chair, has repeatedly demanded that ICE agents leave public-school property; in the first of these encounters, a few weeks ago, a masked ICE agent used his phone to record Granlund, her car, and her license plate, while reciting aloud her full legal name and address. Teachers at Highland Elementary School routinely stick around after dismissal to patrol the perimeter of the high school next door—where Homeland Security agents often loiter—as it lets out for the day. “I’ve seen first-grade teachers and music teachers with whistles in hand, running toward ICE,” Zena Stenvik, the Columbia Heights Public Schools superintendent, told me. “Literally, educators are putting their bodies between ICE agents and children.” On January 21st, an ICE vehicle pulled into the loading dock of the high school; in a video of the incident, taken from a classroom window, students can be overheard in a hubbub of jeering, incredulity, and fear.

Recently, Granlund was picking up her son from the high school when she heard that ICE had descended on a nearby apartment complex, one that is home to many students in the district. She ran with some teachers, blowing their whistles, to the parking lot where ICE agents had been spotted. In a video of the incident, about a half-dozen women, unarmed and dressed for the classroom, square off against at least four masked agents of the federal government, their chests puffed out under bulky tactical gear. The women scream at ICE to get out, that they are not welcome in their community. “Are your moms proud of you?” one calls out. “Do they know what you do? Do they know that you separate families?”

In the video, the ICE guys mill about, menacing yet uncertain. One of them has fashioned a sinister balaclava out of his cap and neck gaiter. “You cos-patriot fucking losers, Jesus Christ, go!” a woman yells. As the ICE agents fade back into their vehicles, one of them dawdles as he gets into a passenger seat, making sure to position his gun so that the women can see it before he shuts the door. “Ooh, you have a fucking gun?” one of the women taunts him. “Is your penis that small?”

The ICE agents eventually did leave, empty-handed. Less than a week later, another encounter on the school run had a different outcome. On January 20th, Granlund was again on her way to pick up her kids when she drove past a familiar sight: a cluster of parked cars, people honking and screaming and blowing whistles. She got out of her car and ran toward the commotion, her school-board lanyard in hand. “The school is here!” someone called out. The abduction of Liam Conejo Ramos and his father—both of whom have pending asylum claims—was unfolding in the driveway of the family’s home, on a street where Granlund often walks her dog.

“I kept screaming that I could take him,” Granlund said. “It happens all the time that parents miss the bus stop because they had to work late, they got caught in traffic, whatever, and our policy is to bring the kid back to school and they can wait there.” As horrifying as the scene in the driveway was, Granlund could instantly calculate her most useful place in it: she’s the lady who looks after the boy whose father is unexpectedly unavailable. She went on, “I’ve had a background check”—meaning that she was vetted to care for kids—“and I knew I could keep Liam physically safe. There was no reason—I was saying, ‘I’m from the school; I can take him.’ And they took him, and I’m, like, What—where did—where did he go? They took him. They took Liam.”

Detainees at the Dilley facility have reported moldy food, unclean drinking water, unsanitary living conditions, and inadequate medical care; Liam has a persistent fever, is lethargic, and is not eating well, Stenvik told me. The Flores Settlement Agreement, which sets minimal standards for children in federal custody, requires that they be placed in the “least restrictive” setting according to their age and needs. “But there is no reason for ICE to detain Liam to begin with,” Ann Garcia, a senior staff attorney at the National Immigration Project, said. “Liam and his family have pending asylum applications. They have done nothing contrary to their immigration obligations that would warrant any detention, especially when Liam is quickly decompensating in detention. The ‘least restrictive setting’ for Liam is at home with his family in Minneapolis.”

On January 28th, three U.S. representatives from Texas, including Joaquin Castro, visited the Dilley facility, and afterward expressed concerns about the mental and physical health of the children who are trapped there. Castro also reported that ICE had taken Liam’s bunny hat and Spider-Man backpack, and that Liam is hoping to get them back.

Columbia Heights was as prepared for an immigration crackdown as could be reasonably expected of any community or school system—but there has been nothing reasonable about the ICE terror campaign. After the 2024 election of Donald Trump, who promised mass deportations, the school district partnered with a local law firm to offer parents free informational sessions in English and Spanish on immigration rights. “We were all very prepared for what to do if—naïvely, in my imagination—an ICE agent came to the door with a signed judicial warrant,” Stenvik said. “That’s not at all what is happening. This is indiscriminate.”

Schools also worked with vulnerable families to notarize a form assigning delegation of parental authority, or DOPA, which insures a temporary transfer of custody and caregiving decisions to a trusted adult, in case a parent is abducted by ICE. “A lot of our families have filled out DOPA forms, so we are able to place those students in caring hands,” Jason Kuhlman, the principal of Valley View Elementary, said. Three of Kuhlman’s students at Valley View—including Liam, who was enrolled in the pre-K program—are now in Dilley. “Typically, what we’re seeing is that ICE picks up one parent. It’s malicious, because the other parent probably isn’t going to be able to make it by themselves. They’re going to self-deport, or they will deport the whole family in order to stay together,” Kuhlman said. Not as many families signed ICE’s so-called “privacy waivers” before being arrested or detained, giving Homeland Security a pretext for withholding vital information from legislators and schools about the families it has captured.

Valley View’s student population is two-thirds Hispanic, with a sizable Ecuadorian population, and thus especially vulnerable to ICE. Kuhlman told me about one of his fourth graders, whose mother was taken by ICE while she was walking to the local supermarket to buy formula for her baby. The student’s grandmother, who also lived in the home and was caring for the infant, was too frightened to pick up the older child at school, so officials scrambled to find the child’s uncle. At Valley View alone, at least twenty-three families have had a mother or a father taken by ICE. “And that’s not counting grandmas and grandpas, that’s not aunts and uncles,” Kuhlman added, noting that many of his students live in multigenerational and extended-family households.

School administrators have started calling families after raids to make sure that no children are left behind after their caregivers have been abducted. “There have been many evenings,” Stenvik said, “when a home in the community has been raided, and I look up the address to see if any students of ours live there, and then I call the parent or the emergency contact to say—and I have actually had to say this—‘Was your four-year-old left alone? Do you know where your four-year-old is?’ ”

School life has both widened and narrowed in Columbia Heights since the all-out assault on Minneapolis began. Local educators now see providing security details for their students as part of their job description. Their schools double as food banks. Kuhlman spent much of January 23rd delivering laptops to students who have opted for remote learning. (Absentee rates at Valley View peaked at around twenty-five per cent, Kuhlman said, before remote learning ramped up.) In a throwback to the pandemic, Kuhlman and his colleagues worked up the new program in a matter of days—but Valley View has none of the funding that poured into school districts during the COVID crisis.

Caution and fear, laced with anguish, must inform every decision. Parents who volunteer to drop off or pick up children from at-risk families “have reported being followed by unmarked vehicles or suspicious vehicles,” Stenvik said. “ICE agents have come up to their cars and looked in the back seat to see, seemingly, if there are children there.” Masked men in tactical gear sometimes park in unmarked cars outside Granlund’s house; on at least two occasions, she said, they stayed all day. After an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, in Minneapolis, on January 7th, and after ICE raided a Mexican restaurant just a few blocks away from Highland Elementary, Stenvik began to worry about stray bullets, and directed the elementary schools to keep children inside for recess. On January 24th, the day that Border Patrol agents shot and killed Alex Jeffrey Pretti, three ICE vehicles descended upon the Columbia Heights high school, which was hosting a volleyball tournament. “So, apparently, we can’t just have a good old volleyball tournament without harassment,” Stenvik said.

Stenvik cancelled the annual all-district band concert, scheduled for last week, in which players from the elementary, middle, and high schools perform together on one stage. “It’s the most magical thing you’ve ever heard,” Stenvik said. “I thought, Could we live-stream it? Could we do it during the school day?” In the end, she decided “to err on the side of safety,” especially as many of the young musicians likely would not show up. “For a high-level ensemble,” Stenvik said, “you need all of the parts.”

What educators in Columbia Heights are keen to convey to the world outside is that—despite national revulsion toward Operation Metro Surge, despite the shock and sorrow generated by the killings of Good and Pretti and by the abduction of Liam, despite the recent dismissal of Border Patrol’s so-called commander-at-large Gregory Bovino, who worked hard and haplessly to become the public face of the war on Minneapolis, and despite statements on Thursday by President Trump’s so-called border czar, Tom Homan, suggesting that he intends to draw down D.H.S. presence in the Minneapolis area—the war is far from over. From some perspectives, it is intensifying.

“It’s worse since Bovino got kicked out,” Granlund told me. Kuhlman said, “The number of abductions, the number of agents in our community, has not decreased. If anything, it feels retaliatory now”—in part because of the attention that Liam’s case has received and the awful light it sheds on the immigration crackdown. Three Valley View parents were detained over the weekend of January 24th and 25th. Another was abducted on Wednesday morning. Three high-school students, in separate incidents, were pulled over by ICE on their way to school on Thursday morning; none of these kids were detained. On Friday morning, Stenvik drove around for an hour before the school run, focussing on areas where ICE has previously targeted students and checking that children were getting to school safely. Sure enough, she spotted a pair of masked agents in an ICE-identified vehicle, parked near Highland Elementary and the high school.

Kuhlman told me that he recently visited a fifth-grade classroom during their morning meeting because, he said, “we were having some issues in there.” He asked everyone to put up their hand if they felt afraid of ICE. “My hand went up, the teacher’s hand went up, and a lot of the kids’ hands went up,” Kuhlman said. The subtext was an old adage: courage is not the absence of fear. “Kids look to us to be the strong figures, but you can be strong and afraid,” Kuhlman told me. “I was saying, ‘Yep, I’m scared, too, but when you’re inside our building, we will keep you safe. They are not coming in here. This is your space.’ ”

The day before Valley View Elementary launched its remote-learning program, the school had an e-learning day for all students, ostensibly owing to extremely cold temperatures. “I had to tell the students that this would be the last time they’d all be together for a while. It killed me,” Kuhlman said, his voice breaking. “We create strong cultures and class communities, and we see that fragmenting. We’re telling kids—elementary-school kids—that they can’t see their friends because it’s not safe. And why is that? Because we have people hunting you.” ♦

In January, 2027, the Sundance Film Festival will be held not in its longtime home of Park City, Utah, but in Boulder, Colorado. The experience promises to be bracingly new, chaotic, and exciting, but there was inevitably a melancholy tinge to this year’s edition, which became, in effect—and affect—an eleven-day farewell. My Sundance unfurled as a series of absences; at times, it was as though the place’s magic were seeping away before my eyes. The weather was part of it. Drought conditions were in effect, and, until the seventh day of the festival, there was hardly a flake of snow. For the first time that I can remember, I didn’t slip on black ice on my way to a screening, or slosh through a pool that I’d mistaken for a puddle—a relief, yes, but also a disappointment. My fondest memories of this place have always been blanketed in white; I’ll never forget when I first came, in January, 2006, on a bitingly cold evening and dragged my suitcase through a fast-thickening layer of frost. As it happens, that was the year that the festival premièred Davis Guggenheim’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” about Al Gore’s efforts to raise awareness about climate change. Twenty years later, a mostly bone-dry Park City seemed to offer evidence, if any were still needed, that we are living in a world that the film warned about.

Another absence: there were no screenings at the Egyptian Theatre, whose old-fashioned marquee had long made it the festival’s most recognizable venue. The theatre, situated on the city’s Main Street, is to become a live-event space; the film projectors have already been removed. I find that reality strangely terrifying, if not quite as terrifying as some of the Sundance movies I’ve watched at the Egyptian. This is where I cowered in my seat at a midnight screening of “Hereditary” (2018), a blood-chilling calling card for a new talent named Ari Aster; it’s where I thrilled to the chainsaw-wielding climax of “Donkey Punch” (2008), a satisfyingly sleazy horror cheapie that has never drifted far from my thoughts, even though it scarcely found an audience; and in 1999, before my time, the Egyptian was where audiences first glimpsed “The Blair Witch Project.” That film is one of a few instant classics—including “sex, lies, and videotape” (1989) and “Reservoir Dogs” (1992)—that helped make the festival’s reputation as the country’s most important and exciting launchpad for new independent cinema.

Most painfully of all, there was no Robert Redford at Sundance 2026—at least, not in the flesh. The actor and filmmaker died in September at his home near the Sundance Mountain Resort, a forty-five-minute drive from Park City. He nonetheless remained a spectral, frequently acknowledged presence. Every screening kicked off with a video tribute to him, and each replay drove home the sheer heroic improbability of what Redford had accomplished. Here was a Hollywood legend who carved out a rocky, high-altitude perch from which a different kind of film artist—one less beholden to the Hollywood doctrine of the bottom line—might emerge. The Utah/U.S. Film Festival, as it was then known, began in Park City in 1978. In 1980, Redford founded the Sundance Institute, the non-profit organization that now oversees the festival and, through year-round labs and workshops, has nurtured several new generations of indie moviemaking talent.

On Tuesday, hundreds of filmmakers—many of them alumni of those labs and workshops—gathered at the resort for an annual directors’ brunch. It had been a tradition for Redford to address each class of Sundance filmmakers. Now the task fell to one of his children, the filmmaker and actor Amy Redford. It was her father’s dream to share this mountain retreat with others, she said, and to transform it into a place of creative revitalization and refuge. “Dad knew that place matters,” she said. “It was in this landscape that he thought it fitting for you to frame your own.”

The festival was renamed Sundance in 1991, inspired by Redford’s role in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969). Redford himself fought the name at first, which struck him as “self-serving,” as he said in an interview in 2015. He was wisely overruled. Renaming the event Sundance—as opposed to, say, the Park City Film Festival—liberated it from the nomenclatural constraints of a single defining location like Cannes, Venice, or Toronto. The very word “Sundance,” with its intrinsically cinematic evocations of light and movement, became synonymous with the festival’s dedication to the art. That mission, in turn, helped launch Sundance satellite events in cities around the world, such as London and Hong Kong. The irony is that few major film festivals have felt more grounded in their environs than Sundance or have conveyed a more physically overpowering sense of place. Of the various reasons that the festival eventually chose to move to Boulder—as opposed to Salt Lake City or Cincinnati, both of which were also in the running—the chance to preserve a wintry, high-altitude milieu surely ranked high.

As to the other reasons, the generally accepted narrative when Sundance first announced it was looking for a new home was that the festival had outgrown Park City, which, with a population of roughly eight thousand three hundred, has long been an improbable setting for an event that, last year, drew more than eighty-five thousand in-person attendees (and was pulling in more than a hundred thousand annually before the covid-19 pandemic). Boulder, in the end, seemed an intuitive solution. It’s twelve times larger than Park City, with a population of more than a hundred thousand. There are more hotels, more restaurants, more potential venues. It’s also in a blue state, and therefore, the logic goes, better suited than either Ohio or Utah to the politics of inclusivity, anti-racism, and social justice that have been foundational principles of Sundance’s programming.

There is, of course, a more worrisome narrative in play: what if the real crisis isn’t that Sundance has outgrown Park City, but, rather, that the industry has outgrown Sundance? Sundance is a festival that made its reputation, in part, on the robust novelty of the American independent-film movement in the late eighties and early nineties. It shaped the careers of young auteurs such as Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh, Paul Thomas Anderson, and the Coen brothers. (In subsequent years, a more diverse class of Sundance stars, including Ava DuVernay, Ryan Coogler, Chloé Zhao, and Celine Song would follow.) The festival also conferred a new kind of alt-movieland mystique on the buzzy negotiations of the film business. Inside-baseball details became sources of enormous excitement. The industry trades teemed with reports of films scoring through-the-roof audience reactions, all-night bidding wars between potential buyers, and coveted seven- or eight-figure distribution deals that sometimes emerged from the fray.

I encountered a version of this phenomenon on the first morning of my first Sundance. Trying to find my way around festival headquarters, I ran into a colleague from Variety, my employer at the time, who blurted out the news that Fox Searchlight Pictures had just bought “Little Miss Sunshine” for a whopping ten and a half million dollars. What the hell was “Little Miss Sunshine”? I found out at a press screening a few days later: a crowd-pleasing dysfunctional-family road-trip comedy that left most of the audience in stitches and that, in time, would become a major indie hit and a multiple Oscar winner. It was the kind of breakout success, in short, that keeps Sundance in business. For the next few years, the festival seemed to operate under a kind of residual “Little Miss Sunshine” haze, with filmmakers, publicists, and distributors trying—and generally failing—to replicate the film’s formula for commercial and critical success.

Alas, though sales activity naturally ebbs and flows over the years, it does feel like such boom-town phenomena are artifacts of yesteryear. From a purely acquisitions standpoint, the most hotly chased title at this year’s festival was “The Invite,” a bickersome marital dramedy directed by Olivia Wilde and starring Wilde, Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz, and Ed Norton. The movie’s eventual purchase—by A24, which spent more than eleven million dollars—certainly generated buzz, but, given that the director and cast are known quantities, it was hardly the surge of excitement and discovery that was once a mark of the festival. The crises that Sundance faces—the lingering shadow of the pandemic, the perilous state of theatrical exhibition—are hardly Sundance’s alone. They reflect a film industry in existential turmoil. But they are problems that might require more than a new host city and additional infrastructure to solve.

My last Sundance in Park City was an unusual one, for reasons that merit full disclosure. I served on the jury for the U.S. documentary competition, and was attending the festival not in my usual capacity as a journalist but as an invitee. The experience of meeting the other jurors became its own kind of trip down memory lane—a Sundance history lesson. Here was Azazel Jacobs, a member of the U.S. dramatic competition’s jury; I first encountered his work at Sundance in 2008, when he unveiled his film “Momma’s Man,” an exquisitely tender portrait of his parents, Ken and Flo Jacobs, who were New York avant-garde cinema luminaries, and who both died last year. Here was A.V. Rockwell, the director of another terrific New York indie, “A Thousand and One” (2023), which won the Grand Jury Prize in the U.S. dramatic competition in 2023.(Rockwell was there as a juror for the short-film-program competition.) Here was So Yong Kim, whose exquisite début feature, “In Between Days,” showed at that first festival I attended, in 2006. And here were John Cooper and Trevor Groth, two former leaders of the Sundance programming team, who were reunited and tasked with jury duty in NEXT, a section of the festival for low-budget and experimental work, which they had launched in 2010.

My fellow-jurors in the American documentary section, the filmmakers Natalia Almada and Jennie Livingston, were both Sundance laureates, too. Almada has won two directing prizes at the festival, for “El General” (2009) and “Users” (2021), and Livingston has won the Grand Jury Prize, for “Paris Is Burning” (1990). Together, we screened ten nonfiction movies from emerging American filmmakers. For now, I’m going to stay quiet about what I thought of them (though the prizes, and those of the other categories, have just been announced), and mention instead the movies outside that pool—or at least the few I was able to slot in—that caught my eye.

On a chilly Monday afternoon, I succumbed to the overpowering heat of “Chasing Summer,” a nimble, sexy, and infectiously funny collaboration between the director Josephine Decker and the comedian and screenwriter Iliza Shlesinger. The movie follows Jamie (Shlesinger), a fortysomething humanitarian-aid worker who, after being blindsided by personal and professional uncertainty, returns to her home in suburban Texas for a summer of ribaldry and revelation. There she endures unceasing verbal jabs from her mother (Megan Mullally) and her older sister (Cassidy Freeman) and also renews her acquaintance with old friends and an old flame (Tom Welling) from high school. In other words, on paper, “Chasing Summer” sounds like any number of flat, formulaic indie quirkfests about the unspeakable horrors of going home again. But that just goes to show that you can never judge a movie from its plot. Although the film skews surprisingly more mainstream than Decker’s previous work—her film “Madeline’s Madeline” (2018) was a wildly imaginative, form-blurring fantasia—the conventionality of the material throws the bristling intelligence of the filmmaker’s approach into sharp relief. As the camera glides in and around a roller-skating rink, where much of the action takes place, Decker and Shlesinger achieve and sustain a terrific balance of comic velocity and erotic languor.

A more fitful kind of funny-sexy alchemy is at play in Josef Kubota Wladyka’s “Ha-chan, Shake Your Booty!,” an uneven but enjoyable comedy about a woman trying to dance her way out of bereavement. Rinko Kikuchi plays Haru, a ballroom dancer in Tokyo who, after losing her husband and dance partner, Luis (Alejandro Edda), begins a tentative fling with a new dance instructor, Fedir (Alberto Guerra). Kikuchi, as she demonstrated in “Babel” and “Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter,” has a gift for playing women at odds with the world, and she taps into a freewheeling, fantastical sense of possibility, both on and off the dance floor. As the comedy progresses, its buoyant tone clenches and darkens, and the plot bends and lurches, in ways that, to me, felt unnecessarily punitive toward both Haru and the audience. And yet the moves keep you watching. Wladyka choreographs the dance sequences—chief among them an obligatory but irresistible shout-out to “Dirty Dancing”—with a disarmingly loopy expressionist verve.

I caught “Chasing Summer” and “Ha-chan, Shake Your Booty!” at the festival’s largest venue, the Eccles Theatre, a high-school auditorium that seats about twenty-five hundred moviegoers. Because it’s one of the best places to see a movie in Park City, more than a few festivalgoers have been known to camp out at the Eccles for the day, filing in and out of screenings and subsisting on a better-than-nothing diet of concession-stand snacks. As I purchased an overpriced bottle of water at the Eccles this past week, I was grateful for the young employee who warned me, shortly before a screening of Adam Meeks’s drama “Union County,” that he had heard that the movie was devastating, and that I might require handkerchiefs. He was right, damn it. Meeks’s film, set against the backdrop of the opioid epidemic in rural Ohio, movingly explores the rhythms and routines of a county-mandated drug-court program, and does so with considerable patience and authenticity. Will Poulter, playing a young newcomer to the program, gives a superb performance; so do the nonprofessional actors cast as his comrades-in-recovery.

I missed more than I saw—but that’s every Sundance. I was glad to catch “Queen of Chess,” Rory Kennedy’s thrilling documentary portrait of the Hungarian chess grandmaster Judit Polgár. I was sorry to miss “Give Me the Ball!,” Liz Garbus and Elizabeth Wolff’s documentary about Billie Jean King, which I heard got a rapturous reception, enhanced by the post-screening presence of King herself, cheerfully lobbing balls into the Eccles balcony. (These documentaries weren’t in my judging bailiwick, as the filmmakers are already very established.) Did I regret not catching a retrospective showing of “Little Miss Sunshine,” in a special valedictory program of Sundance sensations from over the years? Perhaps—though not as much as I regretted missing the screening of Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s “Half Nelson” (2006). That’s the title that I remember most fondly from my first year at Sundance and, to this day, I’m convinced that Ryan Gosling, who starred in the film, has never been better.

The festival wound down, as it usually does for me and my friends and colleagues, at Grub Steak, a rustic Park City fixture, where diners can sit beneath a mounted stag’s head and tear into prime rib—or, if so moved, into more local offerings, such as elk and bison. I don’t think it was until I found myself unexpectedly misting up at the salad bar—which had vanished during the pandemic and taken its sweet time coming back—that I fully grasped that it really was happening. Sundance as we knew it, the Sundance that had turned Park City into a delightful, exasperating annual destination, really was coming to an end. At our table, we wondered what the Boulder equivalent of Grub Steak would be. Probably an Outback, someone quipped. And then we said our farewells. Some of us headed off to bed; for others, another movie beckoned. ♦

At the start of Donald Trump’s first term, he promised that he and his family would never do anything that might even be “perceived to be exploitive of office of the Presidency.” By contrast, his second term looks rapacious. He and members of his family have signed a blitz of foreign mega-deals shadowed by conflicts of interest, and they’ve launched at least five different cryptocurrency enterprises, all of which leverage Trump’s status as President to lure buyers or investors. Ethics watchdogs say that no other President has ever so nakedly exploited his position, or on such a scale. Trump recently explained to the Times why he cast aside his former restraint: “I found out that nobody cared.”

Is Trump right about the public’s nonchalance? Last summer, I tallied how much money he and his immediate family had made off his high office. My method was conservative. It seemed unfair to begrudge Trump the profits from the many businesses he owned before entering the White House. So I excluded from my calculation preëxisting hotels, condos, and golf courses, along with plausible extensions of those long-standing businesses. Likewise, Trump is hardly the first President to trade access or potential influence for political fund-raising, and he generally cannot spend such money on personal expenses, so I set that aside, too. Lastly, I left out funny-money assets he couldn’t readily cash out without setting off a fire sale that would eviscerate their value, such as his shares in the company behind Truth Social, his social-media platform.

Even excluding all that, by August, the Presidential profiteering reached $3.4 billion. (You can review my judgments in the article, “The Number.”) And since then the First Family has kept busy. The end of Trump’s first year in office seemed an opportune time for an update. Did the family business slow down or speed up for the Trumps?

Many investors and consumers understandably distrust cryptocurrency and digital finance. Crypto heists are alarmingly common, and the best-known uses of digital currency are money laundering and casino-like financial speculation. President Trump himself, before his most recent campaign, maintained that Bitcoin “seems like a scam” and that crypto “can facilitate unlawful behavior.” But an association with a sitting President can furnish a valuable credibility boost. Think of the premium that investors will pay for U.S. Treasury bonds compared to notes from some little-known bank. That appears, in a nutshell, to be the Trump family’s strategy with crypto.

The Trumps’ first windfall since my August tally occurred through American Bitcoin, a company that mines new bitcoin with the intent to hoard it. (Under the algorithm that created bitcoin, miners get paid in new tokens for the computer work of tracking digital transactions.) Last spring, Eric and Donald Trump, Jr., contributed their family name—and nothing else of obvious value—to a complicated series of transactions that yielded them approximately a thirteen-per-cent stake in American Bitcoin. Eric, who is now listed as its co-founder and chief strategy officer, has become the company’s public face. If Eric and Donald, Jr.,’s father had lost the 2024 election, surely no one would have handed them such a large stake in a business that they had virtually no experience in and to which they had contributed so little—so their stake should be categorized as Presidential profit. In August, I calculated that the brothers’ thirteen-per-cent stake in the company’s computer hardware alone added at least thirteen million dollars to the family’s profiteering tally.

In September, the company floated shares on the stock market, capitalizing in another way on the cachet of the Trump name. American Bitcoin merged with a penny-stock bitcoin miner as a way of going public without the cost—or scrutiny—of an initial public offering. And the stock market, as expected, has put a far higher price on the company, in part because it owns a stockpile of bitcoin. The brothers’ stake now appears to be worth around two hundred million dollars. A caveat: Eric Trump, as a large and active investor in American Bitcoin, must report any sale of shares, and that might trigger a selloff. So it seems excessive to add it all to the Presidential-profit ledger. I will add only the approximate value of Donald Trump, Jr.,’s stake: about a hundred million dollars.

The number in August: $3.4 billion
Additional profit: $100 million
New total: $3.5 billion

The Trumps have made even more money since August through World Liberty Financial, a digital-finance startup heavily linked to the family. Its website lists the President as a “co-founder emeritus” and displays his photograph prominently; Eric, Donald, Jr., and Barron Trump are all listed as co-founders. Steven Witkoff, the President’s old friend and diplomatic envoy, is also listed as a co-founder emeritus, and his son Zach is C.E.O.

In May, World Liberty began selling a form of crypto known as a stablecoin. Unlike digital currencies such as bitcoin, which rise and fall in price, a stablecoin is supposed to hold a fixed value in dollars. Before July, when President Trump signed the first legislation regulating stablecoin, some of the best-known examples, such as TerraUSD, had turned out to be Ponzi schemes. (In December, a New York court sentenced TerraUSD’s co-founder to fifteen years in prison.) But World Liberty promised that its stablecoin, USD1, will always be worth exactly one dollar. Buyers can transfer USD1 to move money or make payments, and any holder can redeem USD1 for dollars. In between, while USD1s are circulating, World Liberty invests the cash that it is holding in U.S. Treasury bonds, in much the same way a savings bank might invest deposits. At current interest rates, World Liberty can expect to earn more than four per cent annually on the volume of USD1 in circulation.

Last spring, a company owned by the rulers of the United Arab Emirates bought two billion dollars’ worth of USD1. The transaction raised alarms about the appearance of a payoff—because the U.A.E. was simultaneously seeking approval from the Trump Administration to acquire sensitive American artificial-intelligence technology. (President Trump soon granted that approval.) The Emiratis immediately used the stablecoin to invest in Binance, the largest crypto exchange, which has its own interest in influencing Trump. In 2023, Binance’s founder, Changpeng Zhao, known as C.Z., pleaded guilty to violating anti-money-laundering laws, served a brief prison sentence, and agreed to stop running the company. At the time of the two-billion-dollar stablecoin payment from the U.A.E., he was petitioning Trump for a pardon. Binance, as the holder of the stablecoin, can determine how long World Liberty continues earning four per cent a year on that two billion dollars. In other words, Binance controls how much profit the Trumps will make from the two-billion-dollar stablecoin sale. In October, Trump granted C.Z.’s request for a pardon. (David Wachsman, a spokesman for World Liberty, told me that Binance cannot “exert control or influence over World Liberty Financial.”)

Binance is currently seeking to end federal monitoring that had been imposed when he was convicted for violating anti-money-laundering laws. Now the company is goosing the Trumps’ stablecoin profits in another way. On December 11th, Binance dropped its fees for certain crypto trades if they were conducted in USD1. Then, on December 23rd, Binance began paying users of its platform to hold USD1: Binance announced that, for the next month, it would give users a bonus equal to about 1.7 per cent on up to fifty thousand dollars’ worth of USD1 holdings. If this return rate were annualized, it would yield an eye-popping twenty per cent. And, on January 23rd, Binance announced a combination of new giveaways to USD1 holders which roughly extended that offer. Many users leapt at these opportunities. In the months preceding Binance’s maneuvers, the total volume of USD1 in circulation had held steady at about two billion dollars. On December 25th, shortly after Binance announced its first giveaway, World Liberty announced that USD1’s volume had crossed three billion dollars. It has now climbed to roughly five billion, and most of that expansion appears to have taken place on the Binance platform.

Representatives of Binance and World Liberty both denied any wrongdoing. They told me that Binance and its competitors have often paid holders of other stablecoins in order to attract traders, and that several smaller exchanges also provide benefits to holders of USD1. A Binance spokeswoman said in a statement that the services it provided to World Liberty “are available to other projects on equal terms.” A spokesman for World Liberty said that USD1’s growth “reflects genuine market adoption.” But Molly White, a computer programmer who is a prominent critic of the crypto industry and tracks such offers, told me that crypto exchanges have seldom, if ever, paid stablecoin holders as high a return rate as Binance is providing for USD1, or offered bonus returns on such large quantities. She said that Binance “seems like they are just giving away free money,” and that the company’s enrichment of the Trumps, through World Liberty, looked like “a very blatant quid pro quo” for the President’s pardoning of C.Z. (In response to detailed questions about my reporting for this article, Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, told me, in an e-mail, that “the failing liberal media is only pushing the same old garbage narratives” and that “President Trump has always put—and will always put—the best interests of the American people first.”)

Last spring, the government of Pakistan reportedly enlisted C.Z. as an adviser on the use of crypto. And, on January 14th, Pakistan—which has its own interests in influencing the Trump Administration—signed an agreement to incorporate USD1 into an officially regulated digital-payment system. A spokesman for World Liberty told me that, at the moment, Pakistan is only exploring the potential use of USD1 in handling “international remittances,” and that the country’s interest in USD1 “has nothing to do” with its relations with the Trump Administration. Still, it is hard to imagine that, without the imprimatur of the U.S. President, such a novel stablecoin would be embraced so quickly at the highest levels of the Pakistani government. So this deal, too, depends on Trump’s Presidency.

Now that World Liberty has seen an increase of three billion dollars in the value of its stablecoin in circulation, it can reasonably expect to earn four per cent a year on that extra sum—three hundred and sixty million dollars, if that circulation holds up in the three years Trump has left in office. According to the fine print on World Liberty’s website, a company affiliated with the Trumps is entitled to about thirty-eight per cent of that interest, which would come out to about a hundred and thirty-six million dollars in additional Presidential profit.

Running total: $3.5 billion
Additional profit: $136 million
New total: $3.64 billion

The Trumps have also received a windfall from World Liberty through a different form of crypto that it has sold: digital “governance” tokens, which provide buyers a loosely defined right to vote on the company’s future. Unlike stablecoin, these tokens carry no promise of redemption for any fixed amount of dollars; you can sell one for a price that rises or falls like a stock. Yet, unlike a stock, these digital tokens do not entitle a buyer to any equity in World Liberty; nor to any share of its profits, raising many questions about why an investor might want to own them—other than for World Liberty’s connection to the Trumps. Some purchasers may hope that, if the Trump Administration further loosens security rules, the tokens will eventually become a form of ownership. Others may be seeking to buy influence.

After my August tally, World Liberty found an improbable new taker for its tokens: a company that had gone public, in 1991, as Appliance Recycling Centers of America. In 2019, it made a radical transition into biotechnology, declaring that it would attempt to develop a nonaddictive alternative to opioids. In 2024, it transformed again, adopting the name Alt5 Sigma Corporation and shifting its focus to processing digital payments.

In August, Alt5 Sigma refocussed yet again—to buying World Liberty’s digital tokens. It agreed to trade the leadership of its board (and a substantial minority of its stock) to World Liberty in exchange for a pile of digital tokens, then said to be worth about seven hundred and fifty million dollars. Zach Witkoff became Alt5 Sigma’s chairman, and the company announced that it would appoint Eric Trump as a director.

As part of the same convoluted transaction, the new Alt5 Sigma—cashing in on the Trump name and the broader crypto boom—also sold about seven hundred and fifty million dollars’ worth of new shares to outside investors expressly for the purpose of buying even more World Liberty tokens. Alt5 Sigma didn’t name the buyers; a securities filing said only that the investors included “a select number of the world’s largest institutional investors and prominent crypto venture-capital firms.” After this transaction, Alt5 Sigma’s stockpile of World Liberty tokens rose to about 7.5 per cent of all the tokens in circulation, and its share had a nominal value of about $1.5 billion. Alt5 Sigma is pitching its stock as an easy way for ordinary investors to indirectly own World Liberty tokens—essentially turning its common stock into a bet on the Trump family’s future endeavors in crypto. White, the crypto critic, noted that top executives of World Liberty were now running a second company whose mission appeared to be buying World Liberty’s own governance token. These sales enrich the Trump and Witkoff families. She called the arrangement “a mind-boggling conflict of interest.” (Wachsman, the World Liberty spokesman, told me that Alt5 Sigma’s original board had independently decided to stockpile the governance token before Witkoff became chairman; Wachsman added that World Liberty’s USD1 business “aligns with” Alt5 Sigma’s payment processing “roadmap.”)

It’s unclear what kind of due diligence the Trumps or Witkoff had done. Alt5 Sigma failed to file its required third-quarter financial report on time. In October, the company, also without explanation, announced that its C.E.O. had been “removed of his duties.” A month later, Alt5 Sigma said that it had “determined to conclude” the employment of its chief financial officer, who had acted as interim C.E.O. Then, in December, the company switched to a new auditor, and—following questions from the Financial Times about that firm’s checkered record—replaced it, too. Recently, it emerged that in May—months before the deal with World Liberty—a Rwandan court found a subsidiary of Alt5 Sigma criminally liable for money laundering, among other violations. Stock-market regulators, for unspecified reasons, also forced the company to replace Eric Trump with another World Liberty executive as a director on its board—although Eric remains a board observer and a strategic adviser. Alt5 Sigma’s stock, after rising to more than eight dollars on the news of the deal with World Liberty, has now tumbled to about two dollars a share. In an e-mailed statement, Alt5 Sigma said that it remains “excited about our future and our ongoing partnership with World Liberty Financial.”

For the Trumps, though, the Alt5 Sigma deal has already paid off. According to the fine print of World Liberty’s website, after deducting certain expenses, seventy-five per cent of token sales go to a company affiliated with the Trump family, and seventy-five per cent of seven hundred and fifty million dollars comes out to five hundred and sixty-two million.

Running total: $3.64 billion
Additional profit: $562 million
New total: $4.2 billion

In fairness, I will note that the decline in the price of bitcoin since August may have lowered my previous calculation of the Trumps’ Presidential profits at Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company behind Truth Social. Although the social-media platform has yet to demonstrate any profit, it has capitalized on its anomalously high share price by quietly selling large sums of stock to institutional investors (who could flip it after a jump in its volatile price). By August, the company had used the proceeds to stockpile about $3.1 billion in cash and bitcoin. Since the President then owned about forty-two per cent of Trump Media, I previously estimated that his interest in those assets added $1.3 billion to his Presidential profits. Judging from the amount of bitcoin and cash on Trump Media’s balance sheet in its most recent quarterly report, that number may have fallen by about a hundred and fifty million dollars, to $1.15 billion.

Even with that setback, though, the Trumps have made a net total of about six hundred and fifty million dollars from crypto since August. That pushes his total gain since he first sought the Presidency to more than $4 billion.

Running total: $4.2 billion
Fluctuation in bitcoin value: -$150 million
Over-all gain from crypto: $646 million
New total: $4.05 billion

The Trumps have also continued to cash in on the Presidency in other ways—often while engaging in stark conflicts of interest. But it is premature to quantify those profits.

On December 18th, for example, Trump Media used its bags of cash and bitcoin for a stunning new gamble on, of all things, nuclear fusion. Trump Media agreed to merge with TAE Technologies, a privately owned company, founded in 1998, that is one of several firms attempting to develop the first economically viable power plant using nuclear fusion. When the deal closes, Trump Media shareholders will own half of the joint company. The President will be the largest shareholder, with more than twenty per cent of the stock. Devin Nunes, the chief executive of Trump Media and a former Republican congressman, is expected to become one of two co-chief executives.

For TAE, the merger provides badly needed capital. The company has already raised and spent $1.3 billion in its quest to make fusion work, and, in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Trump Media said that it has agreed to pay TAE up to three hundred million dollars before the merger is finalized. The conflict of interest here is glaring: the President himself will be deeply invested in a company that is competing for federal-government permits and funding.

For the Trump family, this could be the most profitable deal of his Presidency, if TAE turns out to be the outfit that solves the daunting challenges of supplying energy from fusion. At the very least, reducing the company’s identification with Truth Social could make it easier for Trump to cash out some of his shares. On the other hand, if fusion does not become viable for decades, Trump Media may end up squandering that pile of cash and bitcoin.

After squeezing tens of millions of dollars out of several major media companies last year to settle legally tenuous lawsuits, President Trump this month filed a new suit—against JPMorgan Chase. He is demanding five billion dollars, alleging that the bank acted out of political bias when it closed his accounts after the January 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol. Last year, the Trump Organization filed a smaller suit making similar allegations against Capital One. Both banks have called the claims meritless. But, like the media companies, both banks are regulated by his Administration, creating an incentive to settle.

In real estate, the Trumps continue to profit from a partnership with Dar Al Arkan, a major Saudi developer with a history of close ties to the royal family. On November 17th, the Trump Organization announced an agreement to license its name to Dar Al Arkan for a planned Trump International Hotel Maldives, which is to include about eighty “ultra-luxury beach and overwater villas.” Emanuel Schreiner, the chief executive of RVS Hospitality, a consulting company, told me that the demand for privacy in the luxury market often drives the rental rates for such villas in the archipelago above ten thousand dollars a night during the peak season, and the Trump Organization’s fees might range from two to ten per cent of revenue—a hefty sum, although the specifics remain to be seen. The Trump Organization added that it planned to finance the project by selling digital tokens that would allow buyers to participate in the profits—an idea that would appear to violate U.S. securities laws.

The next day, Trump welcomed Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s ruler, to the White House. It was the prince’s first visit since his agents killed and dismembered Jamal Khashoggi—the Saudi dissident, Washington Post columnist, and Virginia resident—inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, in 2018. At a press conference, an American journalist asked about the murder. Trump berated the questioner for daring to “embarrass our guest.” As the prince stared down at his hands, Trump, contradicting U.S. intelligence agencies, declared that bin Salman “knew nothing about it.” The President deprecated Khashoggi as someone “a lot of people didn’t like.” Trump also announced that he intended to sell advanced F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia, that he intended to approve export licenses to sell advanced computer chips for artificial intelligence to the kingdom, and that the U.S. had even taken a step toward providing nuclear technology.

More Saudi deals followed. Earlier this month, the Trump Organization said that it was licensing its name to Dar Al Arkan for a new golf club, a luxury hotel, and a number of mansions in Diriyah, near Riyadh. The Trump Organization also sold the use of the President’s name for a Trump Plaza development in Jeddah which will include townhouses, condos, office space, retail stores, a Trump Grill, an artisanal bakery, and a health club (featuring a cigar bar). Ziad El Chaar, the chief executive of Dar Al Arkan’s international arm, DarGlobal, told Reuters that the two Trump projects would have a combined value of ten billion dollars. Extrapolating from the President’s disclosures about similar deals, the Trumps stand to make tens of millions from each of these projects.

Before the 2024 election, Donald, Jr., who has little business experience outside of the family’s real-estate holdings, sat on the board of directors of only one company: Trump Media & Technology Group, where his father was chairman. Since the election, however, about half a dozen other companies have rushed to enlist him as an adviser or director. Some are startups at which his compensation has not been made public, such as BlinkRx, an online pharmaceutical retailer. He is also an adviser to two competing prediction markets, Polymarket and Kalshi. (He has invested in Polymarket, but the company has said that it does not pay him any additional compensation.)

At other companies he has joined, Donald, Jr., already appears to be making millions. GrabAGun, an online weapons retailer, gave him stock that is currently worth nearly a million dollars, if he still holds it. (At the time of my calculations in August, the stock was worth about two million, and he has been under no obligation to disclose any sale.) A penny-stock brokerage called Dominari Securities granted Donald, Jr., and Eric shares with a current market value of more than six million dollars. PublicSquare, an online marketplace often described as “anti-woke,” gave Donald, Jr., shares with a current value of about a hundred and thirty thousand dollars. A company called Mixed Martial Arts Group Limited named him a strategic adviser and paid him options with a current value of about $1.3 million. Unusual Machines, a startup drone manufacturer, named Donald, Jr., to its advisory board shortly after the 2024 Presidential election; factoring in a steep discount on a private placement of shares, the company gave him stock with a total current value of more than five million dollars.

Arthur Schwartz, a spokesman for the President’s son, told me that “the premise that Donald Trump, Jr., would not be financially successful if not for his father’s political success is dumb and does not pass the smell test.” Still, the financial health of several of these ventures—including the prediction markets, the pharmaceutical retailer, the online weapons seller, and the drone manufacturer—will depend, in no small part, on decisions made by the federal government. This past October, for example, Unusual Machines announced that its drone parts were included in a major order from the U.S. Army, and critics have asked whether the family connection to the Commander-in-Chief played a role in the contract. Donald, Jr., and all of the companies he works with have repeatedly said that he does not advise about regulatory matters or lobby his father’s Administration. But he may not need to do so. Allan Evans, the chief executive of Unusual Machines, recently likened Donald, Jr.,’s advisory role to Oprah Winfrey’s former position on the board of Weight Watchers. “What does Oprah need to do? Not a lot,” Evans told Bloomberg News. The Trump name alone, he said, provides “credibility to rise above the noise.”

The drone contract made Unusual Machines a rare bright spot for investors who bought what the Trumps have been selling during the President’s first year back in office. Unusual Machine’s stock briefly tripled to eighteen dollars a share in late 2024, on the news of Donald, Jr.,’s affiliation, and then fell back down to below five dollars a share. But after the Army announced its drone order Unusual Machines eventually regained that peak for a short time, vindicating bets on the value of the Trump family connection.

The other five publicly traded companies that made Donald, Jr., an adviser or director have so far disappointed investors. Shares in the parent company of PublicSquare have fallen to about a dollar from a peak of above seven dollars when it signed up Donald, Jr. GrabAGun has tumbled to around three dollars a share from more than thirteen. Dominari Holdings soared from around three dollars a share to eleven dollars last February on news of its affiliation with the Trump brothers. Those shares currently trade for less than four dollars a share. Shares of Mixed Martial Arts Group soared to $1.80 a share when he signed on in September; they now trade for less than half that.

Last July, excitement about Dar Al Arkan’s partnership with the Trumps helped propel shares of the Saudi developer’s stock—which trades in London under the name of its international subsidiary, DarGlobal—to a peak of more than ten dollars a share. But concerns that overbuilding in Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf markets may create a glut of luxury hotels and residences have now dragged DarGlobal’s shares back below eight dollars.

The share price of Trump Media & Technology Group has fallen by more than sixty per cent since Trump’s Inauguration. Trump non-fungible tokens, the digital cartoons that were his first dabble in crypto, have fallen in value by eighty per cent, and the $TRUMP meme coin—the kind of crypto he hyped last spring by offering its biggest holders an exclusive dinner and a tour of the White House—has lost about about ninety per cent of its value. World Liberty’s digital tokens, which started trading this past September, have fallen in price by about a third, and shares in American Bitcoin have plummeted in price by about eighty per cent since their début, also in September.

Indeed, for most Trump investors, the year has been brutal. But, if you’re someone who can trade your family name for an interest in a business, you still come out ahead—no matter how it fares. For the President and his family, the money-making shows no sign of slowing.

THE NEW NUMBER: $4.05 billion ♦

Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Wherever You Listen

Sign up to receive our twice-weekly News & Politics newsletter.

The Washington Roundtable is joined by the journalist and historian Garrett Graff to trace how post-9/11 immigration policy, which led to a surge in Border Patrol hiring, set the stage for today’s crisis in Minneapolis. The panel examines how ICE and C.B.P., created to protect Americans from outside threats, have been unleashed in America’s cities as what Graff calls “a fascist secret police.” “The Border Patrol has never been intended to be a force that is routinely interacting with American citizens,” Graff says. “Full stop, period, let alone routinely patrolling American cities.”

This week’s reading:

“Operation Trump Rehab,” by Susan B. Glasser

“The Green Monster,” by Garrett Graff, for Politico, 2014

“Why Minnesota Can’t Do More to Stop ICE,” by Garrett Graff, for Wired

“The Schoolchildren of Minneapolis,” by Emily Witt

“What ICE Should Have Learned from the Fugitive Slave Act,” by Jelani Cobb

“Do Federal Officials Really Have ‘Absolute Immunity’?,” by Isaac Chotiner

“Witnessing Another Public Killing in Minneapolis,” by Vinson Cunningham

“The Cruel Conditions of ICE’s Mojave Desert Detention Center,” by Oren Peleg

“Maybe the United States Can Be One of Mark Carney’s ‘Middle Powers,’ ” by Bill McKibben

“Trump’s Greenland Fiasco,” by Joshua Yaffa

“What MAGA Can Teach Democrats About Organizing—and Infighting,” by Charles Duhigg

Tune in to The Political Scene wherever you get your podcasts.

The first documented arrival of Haitian refugees in South Florida dates to 1972, when a wooden sailboat, the Saint Sauveur, ran aground off of Pompano Beach, carrying sixty‑five asylum seekers fleeing the ruthless dictatorship of Jean-Claude Duvalier. Many Haitian families gravitated to Lemon City, one of the oldest settlements in Miami, developed in the late eighteen-hundreds and, at the time, largely populated by lemon-grove workers from the Bahamas. As more Haitians arrived in the area in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, they opened businesses, churches, markets, and cultural centers. Viter Juste, a businessman and activist who’s often called the father of Miami’s Haitian community, coined the name of the neighborhood in the early nineteen-eighties, and it stuck.

Today in Little Haiti, a seven‑foot bronze statue of Toussaint Louverture, one of the leaders of the Haitian Revolution, stands in a small plaza known as the City of Miami Freedom Garden. The plaza sits across from a gas station and bakery, surrounded by rows of modest homes, some purchased decades ago by newly arrived Haitian immigrants, before gentrification began to reshape the neighborhood. Since the statue’s installation, in 2005, three years after I moved to Miami, and a little more than a year after the bicentennial of Haitian independence, the spot has become a neighborhood gathering place. On January 1st, Haitian Independence Day, people stop by to take photos while area churches and neighbors share bowls of soup joumou, “freedom soup,” eaten to commemorate that day. Some afternoons, elders sit on the green benches surrounding the statue to talk or look out at the neighborhood, as they might once have done from their front porches back in Haiti. Occasionally, a group of tourists passes by, led by a tour guide dressed in a traditional blue denim karabela shirt and a straw hat, pausing to look up at the Haitian and American flags perched on tall flagstaffs, before reading the English translation of Louverture’s most famous declaration, at the statue’s base: “By overthrowing me, you have cut down the trunk of the liberty tree of the Blacks in Saint Domingue. It will grow again from its roots for they are numerous and they run deep into the ground.”

On January 12th, at the foot of the statue, a group of elected officials and community members gathered to commemorate the 7.0-magnitude earthquake that struck Haiti in 2010, killing more than two hundred thousand people and displaced 1.5 million. The event has been held annually for the past fifteen years, but this year there was an extra layer of sombreness to the proceedings, which the overcast skies seemed to reflect. On February 3rd, the Trump Administration is set to terminate Temporary Protected Status (T.P.S.) for Haitians in the United States, placing some three hundred and thirty thousand men, women, and children at risk of deportation. T.P.S., granted to certain immigrant populations when the conditions in their home country make safe return impossible, does not provide a path to citizenship, but gives recipients the crucial ability to work legally in the U.S. and, in many states, to obtain a driver’s license. After the 2010 earthquake, Haitian community leaders successfully appealed to the Obama Administration for T.P.S., and it has been extended ever since. Under Donald Trump, though, several countries with T.P.S. status, including Venezuela and Somalia, have recently had their designations terminated, and Haiti’s status is in limbo, as a pivotal lawsuit before the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., challenges the Trump Administration’s decision to revoke it. During hearings in early January, the presiding judge, Ana C. Reyes, questioned the government’s assertion that it would be safe to return to Haiti, pointing to the fact that the F.A.A. has restricted civilian flights over the capital of Port-au-Prince, and the State Department has warned against travel to Haiti. Reyes’s ruling is expected on February 2nd, one day before the T.P.S. designation for Haitians is set to expire.

According to the U.N., Haiti is facing one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world. Since the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, in 2021, armed groups have assumed control of large portions of the capital and surrounding areas, terrorizing civilians and causing 1.4 million people, including seven hundred and forty-one thousand children, to be displaced. Friends and family members of mine have moved from neighborhood to neighborhood to escape the violence. Some have had to abandon their homes, with all of their belongings still inside, only to find out later that those houses were burned to the ground. Displaced families often spend weeks, sometimes months, in makeshift dwellings, including public squares and deserted government buildings, while children lose months or even years of education as schools close or become inaccessible owing to gang activity. Sexual violence against women and girls has been on the rise as a tool of control by gangs. Five million and seven hundred thousand Haitians, close to half the population, are now facing high levels of food insecurity. Since Moïse’s assassination, Haiti has had no elected officials. The country’s interim governing body, the Transitional Presidential Council, has been mired in infighting and corruption allegations, and though its mandate ends on February 7th it has yet to reach consensus on who will lead the country or what form the next government will take.

One of the speakers at the earthquake vigil was Marleine Bastien, a Miami-Dade County commissioner and the founder of the nonprofit Family Action Network Movement, which organized the event. A sixty-six-year-old longtime activist, dressed in black, she clutched the microphone with both hands as she described the dire state of Haiti today. “This is a country at war,” she said. Bastien often reminds audiences that her own story is shaped by immigration. She grew up in a small town in the north of Haiti, in a family that practiced the Bahá’í faith, and as a teen-ager she spent her summers volunteering at a hospital near her home town, caring for malnourished babies. In 1981, her father, who had migrated to South Florida years earlier, encouraged her to seek political asylum in the U.S. after she denounced the dictatorship in a radio interview. When she arrived in Miami, at the age of twenty-two, she enrolled at Miami‑Dade Community College, then earned a master’s degree in social work at Florida International University. For more than a decade, she served as a medical social worker, supporting children with sickle-cell anemia, cancer, H.I.V., and AIDS, and she was one of many members of Miami’s Haitian community who were instrumental in securing T.P.S. after the earthquake. Now, lobbying Congress and speaking out in the media, she warns of the consequences of revoking T.P.S. status for Haitians. To deport them, she said, would be to “send them to a place where some will lose their lives.”

At 4:53 P.M., the same moment the earth in Haiti began to shake for an interminable thirty-five seconds in 2010, people bowed their heads to observe a moment of silence. Afterward, we marched to the nearby Caribbean Marketplace, a bright open hall designed by Charles Harrison Pawley, an architect born in Haiti to American parents, to resemble the famed Victorian-style Iron Market, in Port-au-Prince. During the procession, the sky opened and it started to rain, lightly at first, then in steady sheets. In years past, the vigil has attracted a crowd that fills the whole street. This year, attendance was the lowest I had seen. The rain didn’t help, but neither did Trump’s brutal immigration crackdown, which has left many in the community in a constant state of anxiety. Just a few days earlier, as part of a large-scale ICE operation in Minneapolis, an agent had fatally shot Renee Good, a thirty‑seven‑year‑old American citizen, in her car. As Bastien told me later, “People are, of course, afraid that what’s happening in Minneapolis can easily happen here.”

In the past, members of the Haitian community have felt betrayed by American politicians on both sides of the aisle. A decade ago, during Trump’s first Presidential campaign, he held a town-hall-style meeting with Haitian American allies during which he said, “I will be your champion.” Many of the MAGA-friendly Haitians who hosted Trump were angry about Bill and Hillary Clinton’s long history of fraught involvement in Haiti, including the former President’s role in failed post-earthquake recovery efforts, and the former Secretary of State’s support for the controversial musician turned politician Michel Martelly. In October of 2020, Joe Biden took his turn visiting Little Haiti during his bid to unseat Trump, promising that, if elected, he would make sure that the Haitian community had “an even shot.” As President, Biden extended Temporary Protected Status for Haiti throughout his term, in response to worsening conditions in the country, including an earthquake in the southern peninsula, in August 2021. In early 2023, the Administration introduced a humanitarian-parole program intended to reduce the number of people attempting dangerous migration routes to the United States. The C.H.N.V., or “pwogram Biden,” as it’s known among Haitians, allowed up to thirty thousand people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to enter the United States each month and remain for two years, provided that they passed security checks and had a U.S.‑based financial sponsor. The program ended in March, 2025, and under the Trump White House’s current policy all five hundred thousand beneficiaries could be subject to deportation unless they have secured another form of legal protection, such as asylum or T.P.S., both of which have become increasingly beyond reach.

In the Marketplace, we sipped ginger tea and ate Haitian patties and warm bouyon, a hearty stew provided by the vigil organizers, as Tessa Petit, the executive director of the Florida Immigrant Coalition, addressed the crowd. Born and raised in Haiti, Petit lost her mother in the 2010 earthquake. She spoke of the Haitian American community’s ongoing grief, now compounded by fear of deportations, but she also stressed the wider economic consequences of ending T.P.S. “We deserve to be recognized for what we have contributed and continue to contribute to this nation,” she said, adding that a hundred and thirteen thousand Haitian T.P.S. holders are members of Florida’s labor force, contributing an estimated $1.3 billion in state and local taxes. Elsewhere in the country, she said, Haitians “have revived towns that were dying.” She was referring to places such as Springfield, Ohio, where Haitian immigrants have helped reverse decades of population loss and fill essential jobs in manufacturing and food processing, even as Donald Trump and Vice-President J. D. Vance spread the lie that they were “eating the dogs.” Many advocates I spoke with hope that evidence of Haitians’ contributions might appeal to the Trump Administration where pleas for compassion have failed. A recent letter to Trump from the San Diego-based immigration-rights organization Haitian Bridge Alliance and the A.F.L.-C.I.O. argues that Haitian T.P.S. holders contribute 5.9 million dollars to the U.S. economy and that it is “counter-productive” to decimate a “legal, tax-paying workforce that is already filling critical gaps in the U.S. labor market.”

Many T.P.S. recipients are reluctant to speak publicly for fear of attracting ICE’s attention, but at the vigil a few chose to share their stories. One of them was Corinne, a stylish twenty-five-year-old with a cloud of voluminous curls. She was nine when she arrived in the U.S. with her mother and her one-year-old sister, after the 2010 earthquake. They entered on visas and soon became beneficiaries of T.P.S. After graduating from high school, she enrolled at a local private university, paying out of pocket because, as a T.P.S. holder, she was ineligible for financial aid. During her first year of college, her mother fell ill with a chronic pulmonary illness and could no longer work, so Corinne took a job in a retail store to support her family. She dreamed of pursuing a Ph.D. in psychology, and she earned a 4.0 G.P.A., but she eventually had to withdraw from school. In her retail job, she began as a seasonal worker in the shipping department but was eventually promoted to business manager. She now oversees a hundred and twenty employees, and she remains the sole provider for her mother and her sister, who is now seventeen and applying to college. Corinne fears being sent back to Haiti, a country she has not seen since she was nine. “But I also keep thinking about my sister,” she told me later. “What’s going to happen to her and her future if she has to go back with us?” At the vigil, she said, “We are not a status. We are human beings.”

Alongside the federal immigration crackdown, Florida has launched its own state-run immigration-enforcement program, Operation Tidal Wave, with some of the most punitive measures in the country. In recent legislative sessions, state lawmakers have introduced bills that would bar undocumented immigrants from opening bank accounts and restrict the money-transfer services that many immigrants use to send remittances back to their home countries. These proposed measures come on top of existing laws that restrict driver’s licenses and expand local law enforcement’s authority to turn people over to ICE. Since late 2025, under new agreements with the Department of Homeland Security, Florida has deputized more than eighteen hundred state troopers to perform federal-immigration functions. The state has also expanded its detention infrastructure, opening a “deportation depot” in Baker County, and the Everglades complex known as Alligator Alcatraz, where advocates report that detainees are held in extreme heat in overcrowded and unsanitary dorms with inadequate medical care and little or no access to legal representation.

The day after the vigil, at the Sant La Haitian Neighborhood Center, in North Miami, I met a couple in their forties who arrived in the U.S. in 2022, with their four children, now five, fourteen, nineteen, and twenty. They had walked to the U.S. border after travelling from Brazil through Colombia and crossing the perilous Darién Gap. Three years ago, their youngest child, a boy, was born in Miami with Down syndrome and gastroschisis, a rare condition in which a baby’s intestines, and sometimes other organs, develop outside the body, requiring specialized medical care. They worry that he would not survive if they were forced to return with him to Haiti, and like many “mixed‑status” families they’ve grappled with the wrenching dilemma of whether their child would be better off remaining in the U.S. without them. But they have decided that they could never leave the boy behind.

Attorneys at the Haitian Lawyers Association, a Miami-based nonprofit, have created a dedicated task force to help those at risk of deportation. They have organized free law clinics and offered pro-bono counsel, while also helping clients prepare for possible deportation by organizing powers of attorney, wills, trusts, and guardianship documents for their children and elderly parents. The attorneys consult with counterparts in Haiti, as well as in Canada, where many Haitians have fled, sometimes by walking long distances in freezing temperatures and crossing the northern border on foot.

Vance recently said that ICE agents could begin going door to door in the coming months, exacerbating fears. The husband I met at Sant La told me, “We jump every time there’s a knock.” Josette Josué, the center’s director of community health, told me, “Some of the people we serve are so afraid, they don’t even answer phone calls. They won’t open the door if you visit. They’re afraid to go to church or the supermarket. They barricade themselves inside.” One fifteen-year-old girl, whose family fled Haiti after being caught in the middle of a battle between two gangs, told her mother, who then told Josué that she would rather die than return. Florida school districts have seen dwindling enrollment since 2024, owing, in part, to immigrants leaving the state or fearing being detained by ICE.

Bastien, the H.L.A. lawyers, and others told me that, even if the federal court in D.C. issues an injunction blocking the termination of T.P.S., and even if the program is extended, the community will experience only a temporary sense of relief. The Trump Administration is likely to appeal the decision, reviving the threat of deportation. The only durable solution is a pathway to permanent residency for those who have spent years working, raising families, and paying taxes in the United States. Guibert St. Fort, the program coördinator at Sant La, told me that the people who walk into the center every day somehow hold out hope. “Their faith has been tested again and again,” St. Fort said. “They feel that, if God wanted me to die, he would have let me die where I came from or somewhere along the way.” The couple I met proudly showed me photos of their children—sitting beside a Christmas tree in matching holiday‑themed pajamas, wearing their school uniforms. Their two eldest daughters would like to go to college; one wants to become a nurse. “We have gone through so much,” the wife said. “Like all parents, we hope our children accomplish all that we’ve sacrificed for. We hope their dreams will come true.” ♦

In October, Senate Democrats plunged the country into a shutdown. As I wrote at the time, the Party’s leaders primarily needed their base to see them pushing back on Donald Trump’s authoritarianism, especially after ducking out of a funding fight earlier in the year, though, in the end, they oriented their crusade around the extension of expiring health-care subsidies, a relatively conventional policy dispute. After forty-three days—the longest government closure in U.S. history—eight members of the Senate Democratic caucus switched their votes, breaking the filibuster and allowing the government to reopen. The base howled with fury: Democrats had been winning in the court of public opinion; Trump himself said that the shutdown was a “big factor” in the Democrats’ rout of the G.O.P. in off-year elections the prior week. But I suggested that the Party had already succeeded, both in putting up a fight and in forcing a critical issue up the agenda, and that carrying on would harm, for example, recipients of government-provided food benefits, without making Republicans likelier to cave on the subsidies. Plus, under the terms of the vote, most of the government was funded only through the end of January, when Democrats would again have leverage.

Some of what happened next vindicated my stance. A Senate vote on extending the subsidies, promised in exchange for ending the shutdown, came, predictably, to nothing, and those subsidies expired at the end of the year. But health care remained a live issue, not to mention a political liability for the G.O.P. A shutdown redux looked possible, too, over health care or something else. (Inevitably, the Epstein files were mentioned.) In the following weeks, though, the odds grew more remote, as key Senate Democrats signalled a lack of appetite to go back to the mat, and their colleagues in the House worked with Republicans to process the bills necessary to fund the government on a longer-term basis. All but one of these eventually cleared the chamber with strong bipartisan support. A bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security—negotiated against the backdrop of the Trump Administration’s brutal crackdown in Minneapolis and the killing, on January 7th, of Renee Nicole Good—was widely opposed by House Democrats, many of whom viewed safeguards written into it, for example, around training and body cameras, as insufficient. Even then, though, leadership didn’t whip against the bill, which ultimately passed with seven Democrats voting in favor. As of last week, the Senate was on track to pass that funding bill and others, as a package, by the January 30th deadline, assuming that a winter storm didn’t derail its schedule. The likeliest cause of a shutdown appeared to be ice, not ICE.

Then, last weekend, federal agents in Minneapolis killed Alex Pretti, the Administration rushed to smear him as a terrorist, and Senate Democrats changed their tune, uniting, suddenly, in insisting that Republicans separate D.H.S. from the wider package, pending the insertion of tougher guardrails. This ask was complicated—splitting the package would require sending it back to the House, which was out of session; tanking the whole thing would theoretically cripple swaths of the federal government, from the T.S.A. to the I.R.S.—and yet, unlike in the fall, when Republicans simply refused to budge in the run-up to a shutdown, this time they showed a willingness to negotiate. On Thursday, a deal, endorsed by the White House, was reportedly reached: Democrats would vote to fund most of the government through September, as planned; D.H.S. would remain funded for two weeks to allow Congress to haggle over Democrats’ demands that immigration agents wear body cameras, take off their masks, and end random sweeps, among other reforms. “The only thing that can slow our Country down is another long and damaging Government Shutdown,” Trump wrote, on Truth Social. “Hopefully, both Republicans and Democrats will give a very much needed Bipartisan ‘YES’ Vote.”

A shutdown, though perhaps not a “long and damaging” one, still appeared likely: later on Thursday, Speaker Mike Johnson said—from the not-red red carpet of the (almost unbelievably) high-budget Amazon documentary about Melania Trump—that the House cannot come back before Monday to O.K. any Senate deal, a delay that would close parts of the government through the weekend at least. Meanwhile, an effort to quickly push the compromise through the Senate failed, principally, it emerged because Lindsey Graham was mad that the deal would block some senators, himself included, from receiving monetary damages for the Biden-era Justice Department having subpoenaed their phone records, as part of the January 6th investigation. On Friday, Graham suggested that he would cede, for now. As of this writing, the deal was on track to pass—maybe even in time for the senators to leave for dinner.

Already, though, the mere prospect of Democrats engaging in a deal with the Administration over ICE has excited liberal outrage: scrolling through X earlier, I saw plenty of posts accusing Democrats of caving again, one of which described Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, as a “fascist collaborator”; responding to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’s insistence that a ban on deporting U.S. citizens must be part of any final D.H.S. funding agreement, Graham Platner, the populist Senate candidate in Maine, asked, “Why are we negotiating over things that are ALREADY illegal and banned by the Constitution?” Platner added, “I knew Democratic leaders were stupid and ineffectual. I had no idea they were THIS stupid and ineffectual.” I’ve shared similar sentiments before, albeit less bluntly. But I’m not sure that the latest evidence points cleanly toward the same conclusion—at least, not yet.

In some ways, the calculus that Senate Democrats faced this week wasn’t so different from that which led them to shut down the government in October. The importance of being seen, by their base, as fighting back against Trump has, if anything, only intensified as the Administration’s behavior has grown more nakedly outrageous. Last time, Democrats focussed on health care, which is an unambiguously good issue for the Party; immigration was until recently seen as something like the opposite, but the revolting, ostentatious callousness of Trump’s deportation operations—even before Border Patrol agents killed Pretti—seems to have changed that. (According to the data journalist G. Elliott Morris, Trump’s average approval rating on immigration dipped durably underwater last summer and has continued to trend down; one poll, conducted in the hours after Pretti’s death, found that forty-six per cent of Americans support abolishing ICE entirely.) In another sense, the context this time was different. A leading argument for the October shutdown was that it would give Democrats the chance to concentrate public attention on otherwise diffuse Trumpian crises. In recent days, public attention has seemed to consolidate itself; if anything, Senate Democrats have been the ones reacting to it.

This reality may have given Democrats an even stronger hand this go-around; indeed, Republicans seemed to recognize as much and moved to do a deal broadly on the Democrats’ terms. In the gamified language of the Beltway press, Democrats appeared to use the minority’s chief source of institutional leverage—the Senate filibuster—to score a policy “win,” a rare outcome in shutdown fights. Yet it’s not clear that Democrats have won just yet. With people dying at the hands of federal agents and Trump’s immigration abuses already front and center, they need to secure not only attention but concrete reforms; it remains unclear whether Republicans will be willing to sign off on Democrats’ proposals, and, if so, at what price. Already, some G.O.P. lawmakers, including Graham, are speaking of extracting concessions on “sanctuary city” policies. It’s also legitimate to argue that Democrats have frittered away some of their power here, especially with public opinion so firmly behind them. They could have taken the other unpassed funding bills hostage to get what they want. They could have refused to sanction any new funding for D.H.S., period, until they do.

It’s tempting to see shutdowns as a straightforward moral choice for Democrats: stand up to tyranny or pony up for it. In reality, though, they are imperfect instruments of accountability. Opting to cut off D.H.S. would not have stopped ICE, necessarily—the agency is flush with backup funding passed as part of Trump’s megabill last summer—and would likely have posed more difficulties for less controversial parts of D.H.S., such as FEMA and the Coast Guard. And Congress has other tools at its disposal. At the time of the October shutdown, its Republican majorities had mostly rolled over to let Trump tickle their bellies—when they did anything at all—but they have lately displayed spasms of critical thinking over Epstein, Venezuela, Greenland, the Fed, and, now, deportations. Indeed, the bipartisan passage of funding bills, a departure from recent practice, has itself been styled as a reclamation of congressional authority from Trump, especially given that, in doing so, lawmakers rejected the most swingeing cuts to the federal bureaucracy that his Administration proposed for the coming year. At the same time, the relative novelty of congressional Republicans’ public criticisms of the Administration should not be mistaken for strength—mostly, they’ve been woefully tepid, given the circumstances. Others have speculated that the Administration could simply ignore the expressed will of Congress, on the recent bipartisan spending agreements and any future guardrails placed on ICE. Democrats, in other words, may have done a deal to do a second deal that might not be good on its own terms, and, even if it is, might not be worth the paper it’s written on.

If the key problem with the Trump Administration and its immigration operations is their abnormal lawlessness, it may indeed be naïve to think that the normal legislative process will hem them in. It’s easy to overstate the extent to which the Administration has backpedalled following the widespread outrage about Pretti’s death, beyond changes in staffing and optics. But its response has not entirely been that of a government that views itself as immune from basic democratic accountability. And there is, at least, a rational argument to be made that the rejoinder to abnormality is the reassertion of normality; if Congress has rightly been criticized for rolling over to Trump, then it seems at least a little perverse to instinctively write off legislation that could place meaningful restrictions on his agents. Democrats will not succeed in abolishing ICE, even if they all wanted to. (And they do not; indeed, the tedious semantic hand-wringing about the idea has already begun in earnest.) But forcing agents to take off their masks and limiting whom they can target, and when, is not nothing. The point of leverage, at some point, is that you use it.

Two things can be true at once: Democrats have generally performed miserably in resisting Trump so far; also, their options for doing so are limited and involve genuinely difficult trade-offs. If they fail to secure significant concessions from this position of relative strength, the backlash will justifiably be fierce, and the case for refusing to coöperate in any way with this regime will only grow in appeal. Earlier this week, Chris Murphy, the increasingly outspoken liberal senator, told The New Republic, “If people don’t see us fighting on something as existential as whether we condone the federal government murdering our own citizens, then there will be a mass withdrawal from politics altogether.” In the cynical language of Washington, this is one way of saying that the base needs to see us fight back—the logic that was, perhaps, the main driver of the October shutdown. In a purer sense, it sounds like an acknowledgment of what, in hindsight, should have been obvious even back then: that Senate Democrats would eventually have to fight Trump’s abuses not by proxy but head on. ♦